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Monday, January 27, 2014

I "Really Liked It" Mitt, a documentary about the man and not the politics

Have I mentioned
that I am not political? I don’t vote, and don’t really follow the topics or
points that people touch on while running for an elected office. I watch the
one on one presidential and vice presidential debates as a reality show, and if
nothing really exciting happens for very long I get bored and turn it over. If
there’s a highlight, I usually watch the clip on whatever website I found it
on. I of course read and watch news clips of whatever scandal may hit, so the
exciting and interesting stuff I’m into, the serious stuff not so much.

It’s all right though, because as I
said, I don’t vote. I know people who are the same as me but do vote. They let
the highlights define the person trying to get your vote. Is it better or worse
that I just simply don’t vote? Would you rather someone who opposes your view
not vote at all, or would you rather they vote believing it to be their
American right and/or duty?

I was talking to a guy a bit older
than me and he is very political and very republican. I told him that the
republicans lost the election for the same reason he felt the democrats won.
“The people voting democrat don’t know what they’re voting for. They just vote
for what they see on TV, the are voting for the book’s cover instead of the book.”
And I couldn’t agree more. “It’s like they didn’t have the time or the energy,
people were too lazy basically, to actually read the two books and see that
Mitt was the better one.”

So I asked him: “So is it their
fault they’re lazy, or Mitt’s fault because his campaign didn’t create a
prettier book cover for those who were too lazy to read any of the actual
books?” He looked at me like I was an idiot.

“There are a lot of people who are
like me, don’t really pay attention to everything and they still vote! Obama
got those people because he painted himself in a way that made those who didn’t
want to think too much about it as someone they could trust. He managed to
say: ‘Look, don’t worry about the little things, vote for me. I got this’ and
those who saw that said okay.” Like it or not, those people are voting, and if
you want their vote you gotta cater to them.

Mitt never managed to shake the
stiff “I’m the boss you lazy guys know and hate” demeanor. I didn’t watch
things as much as others but I saw it.

The documentary Mitt really helped
change that impression. It certainly didn’t get rid of it entirely but it did
help curve it a bit, and had this documentary been released before the election
I think he probably would have won. I also think that the knowledge that this
documentary wasn’t going to be released until after the election helped those
involved in it be a bit more real about the whole thing.

Right before I watched this
documentary I watched the documentary Strongman, and at the end of Mitt I felt
that Strongman and Mitt shared something in common. At the end of Mitt and
through the entirety of Strongman, the main guys are at a crossroads for what
they will do with the rest of their lives. The ending of both shows were
melancholic, and I really felt for Mitt at the end, I mean, any guy who would
want to be president has to be a bit insane, but he kept it together through
out the movie that he felt he was the right man for the job. He said at the
beginning that anyone could do it, it just so happens that the right
circumstances happened that put him in that position to run. If it were anyone
else I don’t think he’d have had a problem with someone else doing it. His
family certainly wouldn’t, that’s the for sure.

It was nice seeing his family talk
about his running, and one of the girls says that a con for him running is that
he might win. I mean, if you really wrap your head around the idea of seriously
being the President of the United States, I bet it would not seem all that
good.

I think too many will look at this
documentary as showing us the evil man who ran for president and was defeated by
the good guy, and others will look at it as a documentary about a great man and
how the media tricked the people into voting for the wrong guy, but the
documentary is more about the man – love him or hate him – and how he was going
after something he cared about. I think the fact that the documentary touched
on stuff like the hidden camera scandal but didn’t dwell on it shows that Mitt
is a show about the man and not anything else.

I think that the documentary would not have
been as interesting had he won. Sure it would have ended up following a winning
campaign for a man to become president, and maybe it’s just me, but with his
defeat, Mitt becomes much more than just a documentary about a man running for
president but a man running for a second chance, and losing it. It becomes
tragic, and in that tragedy it becomes a good documentary.